During manufacture of pneumatic tires, bead cores each to form part of a tire are supplied in succession to a tire building drum. For this purpose, the annular or looped bead cores preliminarily produced are wrapped on a bead feed drum. Each of the bead cores has a layer of unvalcanized rubber having a bundle of bead wires embedded therein and has a sticky external surface. The adjacent bead cores wrapped round the bead feed drum endwise stick to one another and thus form a single, apparently integral tube. Difficulties are encountered in separating a bead core from the tube of the bead cores thus integrated together and attempts have therefore been made to eliminate such difficulties. Examples of such attempts are disclosed in Japanese Pat. Publications No. 45-23412 and No. 51-16074. In the prior-art method taught in Japanese Pat. Publication No. 45-23412, the bead cores forming such a tube are separated from each other by the use of a blade adapted to cut the junction between adjacent bead cores. Problems have however been encountered in this method in that it is difficult to have the blade interposed correctly between the adjacent bead cores so that the bead cores separated from each other may be severed or otherwise damaged and the blade per se may be bent, broken or otherwise damaged. On the other hand, the method proposed in Japanese Pat. Publication No. 51-16074 is such that the axially outermost one of the bead cores forming a tube is retained to one retaining means and the tube of the remaining bead cores is retained to another retaining means and the bead core retained to the former retaining means is axially forced to depart from the tube of the remaining bead cores. This prior-art method has drawbacks in that a relatively large force is required to axially separate one bead core from the remaining bead cores and that the bead core may be seriously deformed when being separated from the remaining bead cores. An object of the present invention is to provide a method of easily separating a bead core from the tube of bead cores endwise sticking to one another. Another object of the present invention is to provide a bead transfer apparatus adapted to put such a method into practice.